Bitcoin is a type of decentralized digital currency accepted by many vendors as a legitimate form of payment for goods and services. While its use has been normalized by many organizations, nonprofits, and payment service providers, this cryptocurrency has also drawn criticism due to the relative ease with which it could be used as an instrument for criminal activity.

This reference work offers 228 entries of historical commentary on the role of coins and currency in human events, politics and the arts. Not only does the book cover the evolution and circulation of money throughout history, it also includes biographical information on the designers of coins.

This edition is a revised and updated edition of the international bestseller and looks at the more than 5000 years that humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods, long before the invention of cash. This book is where money as a physical object meets money as policy.

Dollars is an entertaining, informative book on how coins and bills have marked the political and social history of the world. Tracing legal tender from the fifteenth century country of Tyrol to the recent rise and fall of the U.S. Sacagawea and Presidential dollar coins. By exploring the dollar, Bartlett gives the reader an understanding of the importance and role dollars have played throughout history in the geopolitical climate of countries. With a generous sprinkling of easily digested history, Dollars give the reader information on why some coins and paper money seemed to disappear almost before they were released and some others remain in circulation. Dollars also explains the advantages of coins in relation to paper dollars for trade dollars in an understandable manner. Dollars belongs on your bookshelf as a companion to historical and economic texts for collectors, enthusiasts and anyone who wants to understand the dollar better.

This book looks at the tension between currency's real and abstract properties and advancing a vital theory of money rooted in this dual exchange. It begins with the debt tablets of Mesopotamia and follows with the development of coin money in ancient Greece and Rome, gold-backed currencies in medieval Europe, and monetary economics in Victorian England. The book ends in the digital era, with the cryptocurrencies and service providers that are making the most of money's virtual side and that suggest a tectonic shift in what we call money.

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This is a history that covers Rome though medieval Europe (by country) and ends as things were in 1895 when the title was published.

This book presents a detailed and surprising history of money from Charlemagne's reform in approximately AD800 to the end of the Silver Wars in 1896. It also summarizes twentieth century developments and places them in their historical context.

In his most widely appealing book yet, one of today's leading authors of popular anthropology looks at the intriguing history and peculiar nature of money, tracing our relationship with it from the time when primitive men exchanged cowrie shells to the imminent arrival of the all-purpose electronic cash card. 320 pp. Author tour. National radio publicity. 25,000 print.

A new edition of a detailed, scholarly analysis of the development and role of money in many of the world's nations from ancient to modern times. First published in 1996.

Examines the history of money, including the barter system, early trade in North America, unusual types of money such as huge stone disks and salt bars, and the first paper money.

Examines the history of money from the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt to today's cashless alternatives.

Stories about objects left in the wake of transactions, from cryptocurrencies to leaf-imprinted banknotes to records kept with knotted string. Museums are full of the coins, notes, beads, shells, stones, and other objects people have exchanged for millennia. But what about the debris, the things that allow a transaction to take place and are left in its wake? How would a museum go about curating our scrawls on electronic keypads, the receipts wadded in our wallets, that vast information infrastructure that runs the card networks? This book is a catalog for a museum exhibition that never happened. It offers a series of short essays, paired with striking images, on these often ephemeral, invisible, or unnoticed transactional objects--money stuff.

An intriguing look at the exploding phenomenon of unregulated private currencies. The virtual and the real economic worlds are intermingling more than ever before, raising the possibility that this new money might eventually replace the government-run system of dollars, euros, and yen. Edward Castronova is the leading researcher in this field, a founder of scholarly online game studies and an expert on the economies of virtual worlds.